README.md

IPFS implementation in Go

IPFS is a global, versioned, peer-to-peer filesystem. It combines good ideas from
Git, BitTorrent, Kademlia, SFS, and the Web. It is like a single bittorrent swarm,
exchanging git objects. IPFS provides an interface as simple as the HTTP web, but
with permanence built in. You can also mount the world at /ipfs.

Security Issues

The IPFS protocol and its implementations are still in heavy development. This means that there may be problems in our protocols, or there may be mistakes in our implementations. And -- though IPFS is not production-ready yet -- many people are already running nodes in their machines. So we take security vulnerabilities very seriously. If you discover a security issue, please bring it to our attention right away!

If you find a vulnerability that may affect live deployments -- for example, by exposing a remote execution exploit -- please send your report privately to security@ipfs.io. Please DO NOT file a public issue.

If the issue is a protocol weakness that cannot be immediately exploited or something not yet deployed, just discuss it openly.

Install

The canonical download instructions for IPFS are over at: http://ipfs.io/docs/install/. It is highly suggested you follow those instructions if you are not interested in working on IPFS development.

For more details on setting up FUSE (so that you can mount the filesystem), see the docs folder.

Shell command completion is available in misc/completion/ipfs-completion.bash. Read docs/command-completion.md to learn how to install it.

See the init examples for how to connect IPFS to systemd or whatever init system your distro uses.

Development Dependencies

If you make changes to the protocol buffers, you will need to install the protoc compiler.

Updating

IPFS has an updating tool that can be accessed through ipfs update. The tool is
not installed alongside IPFS in order to keep that logic independent of the main
codebase. To install ipfs update, either download it here
or install it from source with go get -u github.com/ipfs/ipfs-update.

Getting Started

To start using IPFS, you must first initialize IPFS's config files on your
system, this is done with ipfs init. See ipfs init --help for information on
the optional arguments it takes. After initialization is complete, you can use
ipfs mount, ipfs add and any of the other commands to explore!

Docker usage

An IPFS docker image is hosted at hub.docker.com/r/ipfs/go-ipfs.
To make files visible inside the container you need to mount a host directory
with the -v option to docker. Choose a directory that you want to use to
import/export files from IPFS. You should also choose a directory to store
IPFS files that will persist when you restart the container.

Troubleshooting

If you have previously installed IPFS before and you are running into
problems getting a newer version to work, try deleting (or backing up somewhere
else) your IPFS config directory (~/.ipfs by default) and rerunning ipfs init.
This will reinitialize the config file to its defaults and clear out the local
datastore of any bad entries.

For any other problems, check the issues list
and if you dont see your problem there, either come talk to us on irc (freenode #ipfs) or
file an issue of your own!